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In the downtown ‘Carlton Hotel’ I met my friend Nelson Botile, former mayor of Soweto; Chr SM Nkatlo, mayor of Dobsonville; Letsatsi Radebe, for five years (1983-1988) Chairman of the Soweto City Council, and Alfred Tekwane, Principal of the Kagiso Secondary School, and also mayor of Mohlakeng. We talked for two hours. I realized that here I was listening to men in constant touch with the grass-roots of black society in the hearts of townships. They said most blacks were rather confused. ‘The people often don't know where to turn to or what to think and whom to believe. They have lost track,’ I was told. ‘The people really don't seem to know any more what is right. They don't know what to make of what is happening around them. How can anyone possibly effectively manage townships, like Soweto, Lekoa, and so on, because people have not been paying for the services they get. You cannot really run a Town Council Administration without residents paying their bills properly. But then, the UDF and other radicals pressure people not to pay in order to deliberately create confusion and make townships ungovernable. Once, people would meet their civil obligations; they would have become regular, recognized and law-abiding citizens. But that, of course, is precisely what the revolutionaries do not want to happen.’
The mayors told me, ‘It is an old story: when leftist revolutionaries are clamouring for freedom, they mean that it should arrive on their very own leftist terms. Before anybody realises what has really happened, their socialist or communist coups will have been completed, turning the euphoria of “liberation” into the traumatic nightmare of having to live through another authoritarian rule, and this time directed by blacks, who will have no regard or patience for diverse political opinions or a variety of political aims.’ I recalled the way Jabulani Patose (27) phrased it: ‘White apartheid will have been replaced by black apartheid - simple as that.’
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